How Sunday blew up at the intersection of Trump, The Villages and Twitter
President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The Villages — a retirement community in central Florida — was back in the news Sunday.
First off, a quick refresher on The Villages. It’s not some sleepy little old-timers park with a few buildings, a swimming pool and a rec room. It’s a five-mile city with an estimated 2020 population of more than 77,000. In fact, if you want some cool numbers about The Villages (like how many golf balls per year are lost there, how many miles of golf cart paths it has or how many softball teams it has), check out this list.
And it’s heavy with Trump supporters, as the Tampa Bay Times’ Steve Contorno wrote last August.
Back to Sunday. President Donald Trump retweeted a tweet with pro- and anti-Trump protesters yelling at one another. (Warning: The tweet has R-rated language.) In the first few moments of the video, which is believed to have happened two weeks ago, a man driving a golf cart with signs that said, “Trump 2020” and “America First” can be heard shouting, “White power! White power!”
Along with the retweet, Trump wrote, “Thank you to the great people of The Villages. The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!”
Then all heck broke loose. Social media, for obvious reasons, went crazy over the fact that the president of the United States would retweet a video in which one of his supporters was yelling “white power.” A few hours later, the retweet was deleted.
The White House deputy press secretary, Judd Deere, told the Associated Press, “President Trump is a big fan of The Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.”
Didn’t hear it? It was said twice in the first 10 seconds. How could he have missed it? In addition, nowhere in the White House statement was there a denouncement of those white supremacist remarks.
That prompted Forbes’ Seth Cohen to write, “White nationalism is no longer in the shadows of America’s towns and villages — it is uncomfortably out in the open for all the world to see.” Cohen went on to compare Trump’s retweet to Trump’s “fine people on both sides” remark after the 2017 white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper on Sunday, Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott called the video that Trump retweeted “indefensible.”
“There's no question — he should not have retweeted and he should just take it down,” Scott said.
Also on Tapper’s show, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said he hadn’t seen the video, but that “obviously neither the president, his administration nor I would do anything to be supportive of white supremacy or anything that would support discrimination of any kind.”
However, Cohen wrote, “Many far-right activists see the president’s language as ‘dog whistles,’ or signals that, despite his own vows that he is not racist, Trump is empathetic to their views. Regardless of what Trump truly believes, one fact is certain: Since Trump’s election in 2016, the nation has seen a rise in white nationalism. A recent Anti-Defamation League study showed a nearly 123% increase in white nationalist propaganda in a single year, surging from 1,214 incidents in 2018 to 2,713 in 2019. This is the highest level of white supremacist activity that the organization has ever recorded, the ADL said.”
This will not be the last story you see about The Villages before the election.
The Post’s big story
Trump’s campaign is “scrambling” to get his reelection bid back on track, according to a big Sunday story by Ashley Parker, Robert Costa and Josh Dawsey in The Washington Post.
They write, “Some Trump advisers and allies are privately pushing for sweeping changes to the campaign, including the idea of a major staff shake-up and trying to convince the president to be more disciplined in his message and behavior.”
It would seem Sunday’s retweet of white supremacy — as well as his use of the phrase “kung flu” to describe the coronavirus — would go against that message.
The Post writes, “Trump’s advisers and allies have grown frustrated with some of the president’s incendiary and divisive behavior and comments in recent weeks and are dismayed by the polls, including some of their own internal surveys that also show him losing to Biden.”
Pence won’t say it
Vice President Mike Pence during a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma earlier this month. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
On three different occasions Sunday, John Dickerson, who was filling in superbly for Margaret Brennan as moderator on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” asked Vice President Mike Pence about Pence’s refusal to use the words, “Black Lives Matter.”
And all three times, Pence wouldn’t say it.
That was the most interesting, although hardly the only controversial moment, during the VP’s interview with “Face the Nation.”
Dickerson first asked Pence why he won’t say “Black Lives Matter,” and Pence went on a rambling answer, invoking the names of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis and the progress that has been made, in his opinion, in race relations. But he added, “I see in the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is a political agenda of the radical left that would defund the police, that would tear down monuments … and support calls for the kind of violence that has best the very communities that they say that they’re advocating for.”
Dickerson then said, “So you won’t say Black Lives Matter?”
Pence said, “John, I really believe that all lives matter.”
On the edit room floor
There was one other controversy involving “Face the Nation’s” interview with Pence. Dickerson asked Pence about coronavirus testing — and the Trump administration’s assertion that cases are rising simply because there is more testing.
Again, as is his custom, Pence went on a long preamble to his answer and then said, “To your point, John, it’s clear that testing isn’t the only reason that we’re seeing more cases, but it’s a significant reason.”
Except, “Face the Nation” edited out that part of the answer. The show later put out a clarification to acknowledge that’s what Pence said. That wishy-washy answer by Pence probably didn’t need to be included and I see no issue with “Face the Nation” cutting it out. If “Face the Nation” or any program were to run Pence’s filibusters in full, the interviews would only have a few questions. If Pence thinks he can duck direct questions by not giving succinct answers, he shouldn’t complain when his long answers have to be edited. In this particular case, nothing that was cut distorted what he was saying.
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